Globally, breast cancer is the cancer that affects most women, and radiological imaging using mammography and ultrasound are currently the primary tools for detection and characterization of this type of cancer. However, these radiological image modalities demonstrate limitations with respect to the diagnostic performance and show a generally low specificity, particularly when evaluating young women.
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging has in recent decades emerged as a promising method for the evaluation of patients with breast cancer. This success is due to the methods ability to identify physiological differences in different cancer tissue through the description of distribution of the contrast agent in the tissue over time.
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging (DCE MR) is a diagnostic tool for examining tissue such as breast tissue and particularly breast cancer, and is under constant development, wherein the dynamic contrast-enhanced curves obtained from T1-weighed pictures have been proved to be predictive for tumor malignity (Kuhl et al., Radiology 1999; 211: 101-110). A significant diagnostic accuracy has also been obtained from qualitative examinations of signal loss in T2*-weighed imaging by using dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) MRI (Kuhl et al., Radiology 1997; 202: 87-95; Kvisatd et al., Acta Radiol. 1999; 40: 45-51).
Some of the disadvantages of the prior art has, however, been that it has proven to be difficult to distinguish between benign and malign tumors by contrast-enhanced MR imaging. The reason for this has been inter alia that previously there has not been any coupling between the interpretation of data from DCE-MRI and DSC-MRI, and neither has there been any intermittent measurements of these two imaging types during one and the same data collection procedure.